Kaiser Permanente Plans $50 Million MOB with ‘Apple Store’ for Health

By Mary Kate Nelson | November 30, 2016

Kaiser Permanente recently broke ground on a $50 million, 87,300-square-foot medical office building in Santa Rosa, California, that will also serve as an “Apple Store” for health, the Press-Democrat reported.

The three-story building will house both primary and specialty care, including dermatology, family medical services, imaging, pharmacy and lab services. The building will also include a technology center, where patients can go to learn how to use Kaiser smartphone apps to make appointments and fill prescriptions, among other things.

The technology center will be an “Apple store for your health,” Kirk Pappas, physician in chief of Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa, said in an interview.

“This is where you can teach people how to leverage technology to improve their health,” Pappas explained to the Press-Democrat. “We can have our patients go online and watch a telenovela in Spanish about their prevention to… help them prevent getting colon cancer, or take away the stigma of worrying about cancer and coming in to get women’s health care.”

The new medical office building will have solar panels on-site and will be an all-electric building. The facility will also be a zero-net energy building, which means it will generate approximately as much energy as it uses each year, the article noted.

The new building is expected to open in early 2018 and house 60 physicians. The location could eventually serve more than 20,000 primary care patients, according to Pappas.